What Hurts the Most

Some people say that the reason I suffer from depression is because I suffer from an inability to see myself for who I really am. In some ways, I think they’re right; I do have a tendency to not see myself clearly. Although, to be honest with you, in some ways they are absolutely wrong. I started out life with a bright hope. Unfortunately though, early on in my life, I was hurt very badly by parents who made a willing and conscious choice to love themselves more than they loved me. This has permanently scarred me. I have walked through the last 17-odd years of my life feeling hopeless. People have often told me, “When you’re young, there is no such thing as depression.” To those people, I wish you could have seen what I felt like. Day in and day out, it was a constant struggle to put a smile on my face and act like a “normal kid”. See, the thing is, as a young kid, already you have enormous expectations placed on you to “behave a certain way in certain situations”. I was never one to try to fit the mold. And so, from an early age, I was bullied. It got to a certain point that I would feel so much pain inside that I would go numb. I would shut out the world and stop feeling. This went on for a long, long time. If I would have known how that shutdown would affect me later on, I don’t know what I would have done. Maybe, just maybe, I wouldn’t have shut down my ability to feel. Maybe not. Maybe, I would have started that a lot sooner. Unfortunately, there is no way to know. By the time I reached high school, I was so dead inside that I began.. experimenting. I would occasionally cut. I would try to drink my pain away with the bottle. In the end, nothing worked. The only thing I got was Society frowning down upon me and saying, “get back in line with the rest of the brain-washed children and shape up”. I think, looking at it from a different angle now, that Society does NOT understand what it is like to live with depression. They DO NOT know how painful it is to realize that yes, you are still alive. Yes, you are still breathing. Yes, you have expectations. I think that is a terrible thing to realize. In my sophomore-junior year, the darkness and disparity of my life got so bad that I attempted suicide for the first time. It obviously did not succeed. For my efforts, Society decided that I was not worth fighting for anymore. To this day, no one bothers to ask how I’m doing. No one cares. Many, MANY people have said, “oh, but that’s simply not true!” To this, I reply, “Yeah? And what EXACTLY have you done to show me you care? Ignore me on a daily basis?” When I ask that.. They are truly rendered speechless. This, my friends, is EXACTLY why I have depression. It’s not some “chemical imbalance”, or some “negative thinking”.. It is the realization that my FRIENDS, my FAMILY, even MYSELF have given up on me. And that is what hurts the most.